(b Syracuse, c308 bce; d ?Syracuse, c240 bce). Greek poet. A Sicilian by birth, he apparently spent most of his life outside Sicily, and much of it in Alexandria. His surviving works (including some false ascriptions) consist of 27 epigrams and 30 longer poems; the latter, composed almost entirely in hexameters, came to be called idylls (eidullia) and contain some of the first and most perfect surviving specimens of ‘pastoral poetry’, later imitated in Virgil's Eclogues. The shepherds of the Idylls usually play the syrinx (panpipes). This was rectangular, with the individual pipes (kalamoi) stopped with wax in graduated amounts; it thus differed from the triangular fistula of the Romans. When Theocritean shepherds play any other instrument it is a single reed, pierced with finger-holes but lacking a mouthpiece (e.g. Idyll v.7). This was probably a simple form of the surinx monokalamos, like the oat-straw avena in Italy (see Virgil). The mention of a double aulos and of a transverse flute (plagiaulos) in Idyll xx.29 is one of many indications that this poem is not Theocritean.
The professional performance of music is illustrated in the Idylls by the singing of an elaborate lament (ialemos) for Adonis (xv.100–44), and by several references to playing on the double reed pipes by an aulētris, a flute-girl. Theocritus reserved his most detailed comments for the sphere of amateur music-making, as in the description of fine panpipes (i.128ff) and the praise of a singing harvester who ‘skilfully measured out the [?]shape of the tune’ (idean harmonias; x.39). Singing and piping do not occur simultaneously in the Idylls; this apparent assumption of alternation was a literary convention that did not correspond to reality, as Homer's description of the Linus song shows.
Impromptu singing matches between shepherds are the most celebrated element of Theocritean pastoral; such ‘flyting’ has been noted even in the 20th century as a feature of gatherings of Greek and Sicilian country people. However, the evidence of ethnomusicology and details of the Idylls suggest that Theocritus was not describing a universal folk practice but drawing on a specific and strong local tradition.
See also Greece, §I.
J.M. Edmonds, ed. and trans.: The Greek Bucolic Poets (London and Cambridge, MA, 1912, 2/1928/R)
A.S.F. Gow, ed.: Theocritus (Cambridge, 1950, 2/1952/R)
R. Merkelbach: ‘Boukoliastai (der Wettgesang der Hirten)’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, xcix (1956), 97–133
G. Lawall: Theocritus' Coan Pastorals (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 54
A. Holden, trans.: Greek Pastoral Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1974)
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN